Over the past 40 years, Werner Herzog has taken us on many a fantastic allegorical journey in his documentaries and feature films (the two are almost impossible to separate): up the Amazon, over the Andes, through the Outback, to west Africa, around the burning oil wells of Kuwait. Like the Ancient Mariner, he hypnotises us as once, in the film Heart of Glass, he hypnotised his cast, and braces us with his uncompromising pessimism. This documentary, his best film for years, takes him to the Antarctic to meet the scientists gathered under the aegis of the National Science Foundation at McMurdo Station, which looks, Herzog suggests, like a future space settlement. They're an articulate, attractively cranky collection of volcanologists, ecologists, glaciologists, escaping from civilisation to explore the nature of life and its likely forthcoming extinction.

There are beautiful images, accompanied by sonorous choral music, remarkable insights into the natural world and the human condition and a good deal of humour, intentional and otherwise. To keep conversation going with a taciturn marine ecologist, Herzog asks if there are gay penguins and if they ever go crazy. The first question elicits a dusty answer, the second a certain yes, accompanied by a shot of a disoriented or suicidal penguin waddling off to certain death.